I'm making a custom UI iPad keyboard app, and I'm doing something similar to this post for the backspace method: custom backspace button crashes iPhone app However, the app will always crash when I "backspace" for the last character in the UITextView. I know -substringToIndex won't work for an empty string, but I tried using a temporary mutable string then using -deleteCharactersInRange, and that crashed it too. I'm guessing the crash is due to me manually setting the -selectedRange property for the text view after deleting a character? But even if I do: textView.selectedRange = NSMakeRange(0, 0); the app will crash. Any ideas?